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“a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.”

&quotEnvy; Or, Yiddish in America,&quot The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1969)

“All pity is self-pity.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotEnvy; Or, Yiddish in America,&quot The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1969)

“It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWomen and Creativity,&quot in Motive (1969)

“We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWomen and Creativity,&quot in Motive (1969)

“We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake — especially an obvious idea — has no respectability.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWomen and Creativity,&quot in Motive (1969)

“Paradise is only for those who have already been there.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotEnvy; Or, Yiddish in America,&quot The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)

“The engineering is secondary to the vision.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotThe Hole/Birth Catalog,&quot The First Ms. Reader (1972)

“In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWe Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables,&quot in Ms. (1972)

“Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWe Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables,&quot in Ms. (1972)

“I'm not afraid of facts; I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called scientific mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotWe Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables,&quot in Ms. (1972)

“What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.”

Cynthia Ozick,

foreword, Art and Ardor (1983)

“Time at length becomes justice.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotTruman Capote Reconsidered,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotToward a New Yiddish,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“... literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotToward a New Yiddish,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotToward a New Yiddish,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotThe Riddle of the Ordinary,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotLiterature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotThe Lesson of the Master,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”

Cynthia Ozick,

in Helen Benedict, &quotA Writer's First Readers,&quot The New York Times Book Review (1983)

“I was taking a course with Lionel Trilling and wrote a paper for him with an opening sentence that contained a parenthesis. He returned the paper with a wounding reprimand: 'Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence.' Ever since then, I've made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence.”

“One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.”

&quotThe 21st Cathedral of the Week,&quot in The New York Times Magazine (1993)

“Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it — so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.”

“There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.”

Cynthia Ozick

“The ordinary is the divine.”

Cynthia Ozick

“In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.”

Cynthia Ozick,

&quotMorgan and Maurice: A Fairy Tale,&quot Art and Ardor (1983)

“Everybody inherits a past. And it glimmers either happily or miserably.”